Local management and its impact on safety culture and safety within Norwegian shipping

This paper addresses safety culture on tankers and bulk carriers and which factors affect the safety culture onboard vessels. The empirical setting for the study is the Norwegian shipping industry. Safety management is a challenging issue within shipping for several reasons. First of all, life and work onboard a vessel is a 24 hour activity and the crew has few possibilities of interacting with the surrounding society. Secondly the geographical distance between the on-shore organization and the vessel may affect both the quality of those systems and plans developed on shore and their implementation on the vessels. The ship management is thus identified as a key factor to a sound safety culture along with the on shore crewing strategy.